I think it made a big difference in the way people look at things. I'm glad I saw it. I'm happy to be a part of it and see it and do it." - Willis Rey, member of the 1962-63 Jesuit freshman class

On Aug. 28, 1963, the day
a vast crowd gathered in Washington, D.C., to make an epic stand for equality and witness the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. deliver his historic "I Have a Dream" speech, Lawrence
Haydel, Jr., was about to turn 15 in New Orleans.

He was too young to fully comprehend it then, but that year Haydel had
played a distinct role in the civil rights movement that King and the March on
Washington embodied. Haydel had just finished his freshman year as one of eight African-American students selected to integrate Jesuit High School.

For him,
civil rights struggles were an all-day, every day routine, less profound than the historic endeavor King and many others understood it to be.

"All that
stuff was on the radio, but I was so tired of that issue," said Haydel, now 64
and retired from running his own construction company. "I didn't pay much
attention to it at all."

It was only after becoming an adult, Haydel said, when he reflected more
on the march and King's speech and related it to his experience at
Jesuit, that he started to see the broader
meaning of his own personal experience.

As the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington approaches, Haydel and others who helped integrate local schools reflected recently on how their seemingly ordinary act -- attending school -- played a role in an extraordinary movement that helped change how people in our region saw and treated each other.

"I know
that Jesuit has become a multicultural friendly place and accepting of all
kinds of people, and I'm glad I was a part, hopefully a part, of making that
happen," Haydel said.

"He paid
the price, but he also opened a lot of doors," Haydel said of King. "And I
walked through one of them. And I paid the price for that. And that made me a
better person."

One of the
panelists was Stephen McKenna, now a surgeon living in Maryland, who helped integrate
St. Leo the Great School, a Catholic institution in Gentilly, as a second grader in 1962-63. He went on
to attend Jesuit, graduating in 1974.

McKenna, 57,
came from the all-black Corpus Christi Catholic School. He said he had rarely, if
ever, heard "the n-word" in use until it was incorporated into the name of a
game of tag at St. Leo.

"I got called
different names at different times along the way," McKenna said.

That added
to other indignities. A nun, in urging him to learn the piano, said, "You'll be
a real credit to your race." He was beaten up after school and then blamed for
the altercations. A friend told him his father wouldn't let him walk home with
McKenna any more. Teachers refused to believe he was an advanced reader and
accused him of lying about the selections he had completed.

"My whole
education was spent either being the first, or near first, black kid everywhere
I went," he said.

When it
came time for high school, he considered traditionally black St. Augustine High
but decided to take on the challenge of Jesuit.

"I decided
I'm not going to let them run me," McKenna said. "I'm going to stick it out."

Of the
march, he said, "I have vague memories of seeing it on the black and white TV."

"When we
were little kids like that, we didn't choose the fight," he said. "The struggle
was just there, and we were born into it."

A half-century
later, McKenna said, "People have begun to drop some of that artificiality,
some of that foolishness, so you can be who you are."

Dream of attending St. Augustine detoured to Jesuit

As Haydel
grew up, the image of the ideal high school for an African-American boy in New Orleans was St.
Augustine. That was the school ingrained in the social fabric of his family and
neighbors.

"My whole
life up to then was knowing that I was going to go to St. Augustine," Haydel
said. "That was my plan."

But in the
summer before high school, he learned his father had struck an agreement for a
full scholarship in exchange for enrolling him in the integrating class at
previously all-white Jesuit.

"I had never heard
of Jesuit before," he said.

It was a
pragmatic financial decision for his father, who had 12 children, Haydel said. For
school officials, it aligned with their efforts at selecting the group of black
students who would be first to enter the white schools.

"They were
looking for not just black kids, but black kids who had some smarts and had
sort of thick skin to tolerate harassment and still hang in there," Haydel
said. "And they wanted kids who could excel in that environment."

"I was
raised to not shy away from a challenge," he said.

His father
required all of his sons to start working in the family
plastering business at age 11, a business that later would morph into Haydel's
own operation. Haydel had developed problem-solving aptitude and self-reliance
when his father assigned him to figure out, without help, how to fix pieces of
machinery.

He quickly
embraced his sudden change of school plans.

Even as a
13-year-old about to turn 14 who wasn't thinking about direct connections
between his everyday life and the national civil rights movement, Haydel had a
sense of a greater purpose, thinking, "You have to look out for all of your
brothers and sisters who come after you."

"It became
a quest," Haydel said. "I am going to show them nobody's going to knock me out
of here. I'm going to do what I've always done and make it."

On first day of school, protests and insults

On the
first day of his freshman year, his father drove him to Jesuit, which was
surrounded by segregationist protestors carrying signs and shouting rants: "We don't want you here . . . Go back to where you belong,"
Haydel said.

New
Orleans police had to escort him from the car to the door of the school.

Once
inside, he said, he and the other black students found a mostly welcoming
reception from the faculty and staff, but tension with fellow students.

"We tried
eating in the cafeteria at lunchtime," he said. "It was so much trouble, so
much antagonism."

The white
students would close ranks and shut out the black students from sitting at the
tables, he said.

The black
students started bringing their own lunches and sitting on benches in the yard.

That is,
until other students perched on the third floor above them and dropped water
balloons.

The
newcomers eventually gave up and started attending mass during the lunch hour
instead of eating a full meal.

"We would
go to mass at lunch and have communion," he said. "It was tasty."

He
remembers students throwing scrambled eggs on his wool uniform. The food would
get stuck, start to stink and have to be taken to the cleaners.

He went to
school one day to find people abuzz about some disruption and discovered that
someone had painted a lewd and racist message in tall letters on the side of a
building on campus.

"I don't
think I had ever been as embarrassed in my life as when I saw that," he said.

He credits
the school, however, for clearing the graffiti swiftly, erasing it by noon the
same day.

Haydel
said he thinks he avoided even further harassment, or worse attacks, because of
his sheer strength.

Working in
his father's business, he developed his muscles lifting and carrying
construction materials.

When it
came time for the classic gym class rope climbing exercise, most students
struggled, but Haydel pulled to the ceiling with ease, sending gasps of
astonishment through the room. Nobody tried to bother him physically, he said.

On one
occasion some of the black students, longing for a break from the stress at
school, skipped most of their classes to go bowling. They
expected punishment when they returned to campus, but instead the priest who
served as disciplinarian let the bowling incident slide.

"He knew
what we were dealing with," Haydel said. "That's when I knew we had somebody
covering our back."

"We look up to
you. You did a good thing."

One of
Haydel's classmates, Willis Rey, 65, who now works as a financial coordinator
for Catholic schools, described similar experiences. He remembers race-based
team picking during recess. Somebody once threw a shoe at him in the gym. He
also remembers overhearing a priest scolding a group of boys to welcome the
black students.

Rey still
ponders a decision he made to leave Jesuit after one year and attend St.
Augustine.

In his 7th
Ward neighborhood, Rey said, it was an honor to be selected to attend Jesuit in Mid-City. A
neighbor instructed him he would be representing many people through the
integration endeavor.

But for
Rey, attending Jesuit separated him from the St. Augustine social circles more
familiar to him at the same time that he wasn't fully accepted into the
community at Jesuit, leaving him in limbo. He felt a strong pull to switch to St.
Augustine.

Recently, Rey said,
he told a friend that he wondered if he had given up by leaving Jesuit after
a year. The friend reversed the sentiment. "We look up to
you. You did a good thing. You stuck out a whole year," Rey recalled his friend saying.

Once he
got to St. Augustine, Rey said, he became more aware of the civil rights
movement because the priests there told the students to expect changes as racial
separation faded in public and private venues.

The anniversary of the March on Washington has afforded Rey another chance to reflect on those times, and on his role. "I think both events were very significant. I think it made a big
difference in the way people look at things . . . I'm glad
I saw it," Rey said. "I'm happy to be a part of it and see it and do it."

Haydel,
meanwhile, stayed at Jesuit through graduation. He found better footing in the
school when he joined the drill team that marched at football games, parades and
competitions performing rifle-twirling choreographies.

"The
people on the drill team turned out to be broader minded than the general
student population," Haydel said. "They accepted me. They taught me."

"There
were people on the drill team who would tell me, 'Just keep on. We're behind
you. Keep on doing this and don't quit,'" he said.

He rose to
the position of the guidon bearer, who carries the flag in front of
the unit.

In his
junior year, a priest ordered Haydel to attend graduation without giving a
reason, puzzling him at first.

Then during
the ceremony, he was called to the stage to receive a medallion for excellence
in Spanish class that normally would go to a senior.

"It told
me, first of all, that I was doing the right thing," he said. "It gave me a sense
of accomplishment."

By the
time he graduated the next year, he said, he felt his perseverance had led him
to achieve something profound for himself and others.

"I think
the best way I can explain it is to say that I still wear the ring today," Haydel
said, showing off his 1966 class ring. "I don't consider it a class ring. I consider
it my medal of honor."